Bryn Mawr Classical Review 02.03.08: (Another) review
of Peradotto

John Peradotto, Man in the Middle Voice: Name and
Narration in the Odyssey. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1990. Pp. xv + 193. ISBN 0-691-06830-5. $24.95.

Reviewed by Sheila Murnaghan, University of
Pennsylvania.

This dense, suggestive study offers both an interpretation of the
Odyssey and a strong argument for reading classical texts with a
knowledge
of contemporary literary theory. Before engaging with the text itself,
Peradotto opens with a chapter in which
he speculates about why Classics as a discipline has been so especially
resistant to theoretical developments outside the field. He notes
classicists' tenacious allegiance to ideas of the autonomy of the human
subject, the determinacy of meaning, and especially the referentiality of
language that are challenged by the cluster of recent theories that
Peradotto groups under the label "semiotics"; these are theories that in
one way or another present language and other forms of representation as
actively constituting the world as we know it rather than as simply
describing an external, fixed reality. He then goes on to propose that we
need an "archaeology of classical philology" along the lines of the
broader "archaeology of knowledge" offered by Foucault in The Order of
Things. He does not attempt to work this out in
detail, but provides a useful summary of Foucault's argument and a
provocative suggestion. The problem with Classics, according to Peradotto,
is that the field is still caught
in the transition out of Foucault's "Classical Age." During this period,
which ended for most people with the close of the eighteenth century, the
world was conceived in terms of successful representation: language was
understood to have an arbitrary relationship to the world, but was also
seen as an efficacious instrument for knowing the world and ordering it.
Unlike other fields, Classics somehow never made it to the modern era, in
which that conception gave way to a new sense of the historical contingency
of language and with it of the slipperiness of language as a means
of representation.

Such useful summaries of recent thinkers,
especially European formalists, semioticians, and narratologists, show up
throughout the book, as Peradotto juxtaposes the Odyssey's key
points of
narrative self-consciousness with accounts of theoretical positions that
can illuminate them. Focussing on those passages in which the poem itself
seems most concerned to foreground the open-endedness of signification and
narration, Peradotto evokes a poem that embraces and exploits the
linguistic indeterminacy that modern theory describes. One of those
passages is Teiresias' unusually conditional prophecy in Odyssey 11
which,
as Peradotto shows through a close and original reading, is studiously
ambiguous about the ultimate conclusion to Odysseus' story, leaving it
open whether or not Odysseus will actually succeed in placating Poseidon
and winning a gentle death. This analysis is grounded in an exposition of
theories about what the shapes of narrative plots mean, with special
attention to Bremond, and in an account
of Bakhtin's view of texts as dialogic. Bakhtin's dialogism is perhaps
the theoretical concept on which Peradotto relies most in developing his
vision of the Odyssey as a polysemous text that incorporates
contrasting
voices. In Bakhtin's terms, these are
variously centripetal voices, voices that impose unifying and ordering
perspectives and uphold dominant political power, and centrifugal voices,
voices that cut against impulses to unity and domination and express the
perspectives of the politically dispossessed. Peradotto aligns this
Bakhtinian dialogism with an opposition between myth, a form of narrative
that enforces submission to the ordering principles of fate and human
limitation, and folktale, a form of narrative that indulges human desires
for freedom and fulfillment.

The other passages that particularly
interest Peradotto are those which have to do with naming: the opening
lines of the poem in which its hero is identified, Odysseus' encounter
with the Cyclops in Book 9, the account of Odysseus' naming in Book 19. He
prefaces his examination of these passages with a survey of the debate
among philosophers from Mill to Searle about the implications of bestowing
a proper name, and he concludes that the poem deliberately draws back from
any attempt to use naming as a way of closing off possibilities or
locking in a particular description of the self. For Peradotto, the poet's
initial failure to name the poem's hero and Odysseus' subsequent
identification of himself to the Cyclops as "Outis" are not difficulties
that the poet and hero must overcome as the poem unfolds, but creative,
definitive refusals of meaning. Indeed, this embrace of indeterminacy is
only furthered when "Outis" gives way to the hero's proper name since, in
an argument that owes much to the work of George Dimock, Peradotto notes
that "Odysseus" preserves the ambiguity between hating and being hated of
the verb odusasthai. This ambiguity springs from the verb's
appearance in the middle voice, a grammatical category that provides
Peradotto with a neat emblem for the Odyssey's presentation of
human
experience: as balanced between disparate outlooks and conflicting
outcomes, and constructed by the voice or voices in which it is told.

In his opening chapter, Peradotto several times insists that there is
no unbridgeable gap between the newer critical methods he so knowledgeably
champions and the traditional humanist approaches that have dominated
classical studies up till now, and his
own argument ultimately brings about a rapprochement between the two. His
conclusion is that, while the Odyssey is marked by its fostering of
several viewpoints and its avoidance of determinate meanings, it does
finally favor its centrifugal over its centripetal voice. At a certain
point, there appears to be shift in the argument, through which the
openness that originally betokens a balance between the two voices
ultimately comes itself to signify the centrifugal.

In the
self-consciousness of his art, the story-teller creates a subject
at once polytropos and outis, a secret basis for open
predication, rather than a determinate sum of predicates,
and thus represents a paradigm for a view of the self as
capable, dynamic, free, rather than fixed, fated, defined.
(169)

In its very polyvocality, the text takes on the
wish-fulfilling character of its centrifugal side, and yields a vision of
the self as self-sufficient, original, and creative. This is, of course,
precisely the vision cherished by the traditionalists, who
in the first chapter were seen to be impeding the progress of classical
studies. The implications of this conclusion for specific issues of
Homeric composition are equally compatible with a conservative position,
for Peradotto sees the epic poet as sharing the freedom of his
characters, actively shaping his material without being unduly hampered by
external limitations, in this case the weight of poetic tradition; thus he
allies himself with those who, reacting against the implications of
Parry's findings, downplay the role of the oral tradition and of social
context in shaping the epics and cultivate an image of Homer as an
autonomous poetic genius.

Peradotto's procedure of finding the
concerns of modern theory mirrored in the concerns of the Odyssey
is an
excellent strategy for advocating the use of theory in reading this and
other ancient texts, for it both proves that theory is not alien to the
text and removes theory's sting. What makes various semiotic approaches
with their stress on aspects of signification that are "intended,
virtual, anonymous, compulsory, unconscious" (12-13) so threatening is
their suggestion that language and other systems of meaning are more
powerful than their users: meaning gets away from those who attempt to
impose it; systems of representation implicate their users in meanings
they never thought they intended; or, in the particular terms of Homeric
studies, a poet is the mouthpiece of an entire tradition rather than of
his own personal outlook. This threat is mastered when the manifold
possibilities of language are thought to be recognized, foregrounded, and
exploited by a brilliant poet like Homer or a brilliantly clever
character like Odysseus.

The methodologies that Peradotto argues
for here can be used, and are being used, in ways that assume a less
perfect harmony between the purposes of the critic and the purposes of the
text, and for that reason they will always be resisted by some. For
example, the Odyssey can be read with less optimism about the
poet's ability always to control the meaning of his words, more stress on
the unequal distribution of power among the poem's various voices, and
more attention to points at which the text attempts, whether successfully
or not, to impose an ideological viewpoint. The particular advantage of
Peradotto's approach, which he pursues with impressive learning and
energy, is that it allows him to make a much-needed case for recognizing
that modern theory is not alien to classical literature, that theory can
be used to locate the continuities that really do exist between the
concerns of ancient poets and those who have absorbed the outlook of the
modern era.